Rediscovering Faith and Hope

When all the rubble in our lives is removed, what is it that will remain steadfast?

As the ashes are slowly moved away from the city of New York, as the remains of buildings, cars and bodies are slowly cleared, there is left behind very little. In the pain of it all, it is a time for us to ask again as a nation and as individuals, just what is the core of our life? When all the rubble in our lives is removed, what is it that will remain steadfast?

This morning I simply want to share a few thoughts with you following our experience as a nation this week:

1) We discover again that there is a part of humanity that really is fallen. There is within the human person the ability to uphold a principle which has absolutely no regard for human life. Men and women have suffered the most painful deaths, whether that was on one of the airplanes which was hijacked and forcefully crashed, whether it was one of thousands of people in the World Trade Center in New York or the Pentagon in Washington DC, or whether it was one of the faithful people seeking to offer support when all of a sudden another building collapsed and they were trapped for the rest of their life. The stories and the tragedies go on and on and on& five thousand times over and over again.

For the Islamic sect of Osama bin Laden, whom at this point we assume are responsible, their principle overrides the significance of human life. Their basic belief is that the Muslim world is being poisoned and desecrated by infidels, people who do not believe and support them. These include outsiders such as the United States and Israel, and governments of Muslim states --such as Egypt and Jordan-- that have committed apostasy, in their terms. But what is clear, is that Bin Laden and his followers don't want anything from us. They don't want our sympathy. There is no material thing we can offer them. They don't want to participate in the community of nations. (They don't really believe in the nation-state.) They are motivated by religion, not politics. They answer to no one but their god, so they certainly won't answer to us. This is what we are confronting.

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The issue goes beyond just good vs. bad people. There is a fundamental religious split. I do not in any way believe that God is such that he supports this kind of violence. There is within the human person whom God has made, the ability to turn away and to distort and deny the heart of who he is and what this life is about, sometimes they are even couched in the terms of religion.